As more news organizations move toward web content systems that were originally intended for single-person bloggers, the need for a more dynamic tool has becoming increasingly apparent. The New York Times recognizes this and has launched some code that could help. Called ICE (“Integrated Content Editor”), the tool lets collaborators of a web-based text document track changes from multiple users.

In the demo, you can select different users from a dropdown to see their various contributions and deletions in the document. You can toggle between showing/hiding changes.

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We’ve long-touted Dipity as a great tool for making timelines, but the days of free, online tools are quickly being replaced by an era of free open-source tools.  While Dipity is still great if you want an easy-to-use interface and are willing to shell out $50/month for unlimited use, open source timelines give you ultimate control and ownership of your content. Read more

Timelines are an effective storytelling tool that can display information that occurs over time in an attractive, easy to follow format.

While there are many tools available to do the trick, one stands out for its power, and that’s ProPublica’s open source TimelineSetter.

The introduction to TimelineSetter reads like this: “TimelineSetter creates beautiful timelines.”

That’s an understatement.

The timelines created by TimelineSetter are sleek, can incorporate rich media like Google Maps and YouTube videos and can be easily modified. Read more

A former colleague of mine, William Davis, understands what a “web first” workflow is, and has made it happen through software at his newspaper in Maine.  The Bangor Daily News announced this week that it completed its full transition to open source blogging software, WordPress. And get this: The workflow integrates seamlessly with InDesign, meaning the paper now has one content management system for both its web and print operations. And if you’re auspicious enough, you can do it too — he’s open-sourced all the code!

The video embedded above is a screencast from Davis, which outlines the new editorial workflow.

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